LA firefighting recruits: One of 70

My cousin Ben, may he rest in peace, told me years ago that he was having terrible dreams about his house going up in flames, and the firefighter is there but can’t save him because she’s a woman. As the feminist lawyer in the family, I was surely to blame.

He needn’t have worried.

The Los Angeles Fire Department began training its first class of recruits in five years — 70 in all, 69 men and one woman. Sixty percent of the recruit class is white, compared to 29 percent of the city. Overall, the department has been 3 percent female since 1995.

I don’t know whether my uncle and aunt ever had occasion to call on the fire department, but my guess is, dollars to donuts, it was not to be carried out of a burning building (I would have heard about something like that), but because of a health emergency. The latest numbers for Los Angeles are that 85 percent of the calls are for medical care. So that petite gal that my cousin was worried about? All that matters is how skilled she is, not how tall.

There are all kinds of answers for why the numbers are what they are. Fire stations are notoriously “rowdy,” which is a nice word for prone to be the subject of harassment suits. And even when those suits are successful — and they certainly have been over the years and not only in Los Angeles — you are still left with all of the problems that come with joining a group that has topped out at 3 percent. So if you want the women you have to stay and new women to come, you have to engage in all kinds of affirmative action both to get them there and to support and promote them once they are there.

Peek into a nursery school classroom anywhere you want, and you’re likely to see what I noticed for the first time when my kids were little. It didn’t matter what we parents said or did. The kids divided themselves. The boys wore the fire helmets.

Twenty years later, way more boys than girls are applying to be firefighters.

I don’t think being a firefighter is “better” than other jobs girls may want to pursue. I have great admiration and appreciation for firefighters, but I don’t remember a single day of my life when I imagined myself doing the job. Too scary for me.

At the end of the day, equality isn’t a numbers game. I don’t expect LAFD to ever be 50-50. But if you don’t pay attention to numbers along the road to real equality, you’re going to miss out on talent without even knowing it. You don’t get the best fire department, or the best of anything, by effectively excluding half of the population from the pool.